The Gingerbread Engineers of Evergreen Lane
A Holiday Romance

About this book:

Structural engineer Hannah Miller builds things to last. Architect Mark Sterling builds them to dazzle. They've spent two years as Evergreen's most formidable rivals—trading zoning appeals, scathing peer reviews, and blistering arguments over safety factors versus sightlines. But when the mayor drafts them as unwilling co-captains for the town's sesquicentennial stunt—constructing a twenty-two-foot, fully edible, Guinness-record gingerbread clock tower in ten days—their professional cold war erupts into a high-stakes siege. The prize: the five-million-dollar Downtown Revitalization contract. The penalty for failure: watching the other one win it.

Forced into a drafty drill hall with two hundred pounds of flour, forty gallons of molasses, and zero margin for error, Hannah's rigorous physics and Mark's daring creativity collide in a blizzard of tensile strength calculations, isomalt welding, and thermodynamics that would make a materials scientist weep. As the tower rises—spiral cores, honeycombed trusses, tongue-and-groove joints cut with surgical precision—so does the tension between them. Every late-night stress test and pre-dawn bake cycle chips away at the walls they've built around themselves, revealing that the most dangerous load bearing down on this project isn't the spire's dead weight. It's the chemistry neither of them accounted for in their specs.

With a blizzard bearing down, the Governor arriving for the ribbon-cutting, and a structure that defies every convention of both engineering and baking, Hannah and Mark have one shot to prove their masterpiece can stand on its own. But the real test isn't whether the gingerbread holds—it's whether two people who've made careers out of never yielding can finally design something built to last. *The Gingerbread Engineers of Evergreen Lane* is a deliciously smart, steamy rivals-to-lovers holiday romance where the blueprints are edible, the banter is structural, and the happy ending is engineered to perfection.